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Planning urban heat resilience projects inherently involves the distribution of benefits and burdens, which raises concerns about justice. The just outcome of these projects requires clarity on how justice is conceptualized, defined, measured, and translated into practice. Here, we demonstrate how alternative conceptualizations of justice result in significant variations in the distribution of urban heat resilience resources. We analyze these alternatives through the choices of interpretations of justice theories, indicators for resource distribution, the scale of jurisdictional autonomy in urban governance, modeling constraints for urban morphologies, and the granularity of data. We use the case of Greater Sydney to examine the implications of operationalizing justice, including instances where the increased provision of tree canopies as a resource in the face of urban heat has unintentionally increased injustices. Our findings highlight the significance of contextualized strategies and urban governance structures to organize the just outcomes of resilience projects. • Operationalization of justice theories for heat resilience resource distribution • Quantified spatial injustices using statistical measures across granular levels • Uncovered divergent outcomes between centralized and local decision-making • Demonstrated human-centered metrics reveal higher deviations from justice • Emphasized scale and built environment constraints in just resource distribution
Pakizeh et al. (Tue,) studied this question.